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it's ridiculous how insane the prices on all these thunderbolt drives are. why can't they make a regular 320GB/500GB external drive using thunderbolt and give us blazing speeds for 150$? because if they can't do that then this technology is next to useless. Show me how many people would prefer to purchase a 8TB drive over a regular 500GB one

A macbook(where thunderbolt is commonly found) is a consumer based laptop, NOT something you'd expect a budding business to purchase for its employees. so why do drives that cost more than the freakin laptop itself continue to popup? who buys these? I would love to see some sales figures on this.Reply

The prices indeed need to come down or TB will be a failure. But I hope this won't be another FireWire 800 since Intel is behind this. Once the interface is on every OEM PC and every mobo the tech ought to become affordable.Reply

Intel created thunderbolt to provide a high bandwidth link for display, peripherals, and storage on a single cable. Why create a product which defeats the intended design spec to begin with? Management should have caught this one, its simply a facepalm, find a SSD that can work in the power envelope and design a passive chassis that doesnt require a fan?

Fail 2: Crap controller in a shiny box.

Two junk SSD in raid 0. What could possibly go wrong?

Nuff Said.

Fail 3 : Unseemly, greedy and outrageous price markup.

Yet another company trying to cash in on the Apple design mentality, make it metal, shiny and well constructed...fill it with the same generic parts as everyone else and then up the price tag 250%.\

Throw me in the ring as a bit of a doubter myself. If it's going to be pushed as primarily an interface for peripherals, I have to say "meh" for now, considering the cost. Just use eSATA for something like external disks.

Give me something like 10 GbE over TB, and my ears perk up. That seems like something of value. I don't think we'll see Intel go there though.

Agreed, Intel/Apple's decisions are going to either kill this standard or relegate it to a firewire niche. Their decision to restrict to Apple use only for the 1st year along with their stupid nanny policy of 'You have to certify with us first before we'll let you release it' have really slowed adoption down. Latest dumb move is when they didn't allow mobo manufacturers to devise a discrete GPU thunderbolt pass-through interface.Reply

The problem with the J2 is that a normal SSD for less than $1/Gb is plenty fast enough for even the most I/O intensive work. The marginal value of this Thunderbolt/RAID-0 setup is questionable - particularly if is comes in at $3/Gb.Reply

Clearly the manufacturer wanted to make some high margins here. But until the industry as a whole can wake up to tackling the problem, its pointless. I honestly can't agree with Anand that custom form factor SSDs are the way to go. Just look at all the expense to the consumer with Apple ones. There is no competition there. It should be clear to everyone that we need a standardized form factor, not a custom one.

Of course the SATA alliance gave us the mSATA form factor. Which would be absolutely perfect except its just prohibitively too short. Add merely 20-30mm of card length to mSATA and it can fit double the capacity (8 NAND packages instead of 4). Or extend again to have what is essentially a Macbook Air gumstick form factor. However with a standardized mSATA connector then it would be trivial to make a single card slot which can accept any of those 3 possible card lengths. So entirely backwards-compatible. You might call that an informal extension of the standard. If you will. But its entirely feasible and rational.

Consumers need to have an open market like the 2.5" SSD market is today. Because the 2.5" form factor is no longer an ideal size for SSDs, as was designed for mechanical drives. Too wasteful of the space inside newer notebooks - really "ultrabooks". And perhaps short-sighted of Intel not to do anything about this in their "ultrabook" campaign. Until that problem is addressed we will continue to be offered a variety of sub-standard, not very cost effective, and not very upgradeable products just like this one.

At the moment. For the price of these types of enclosure, most people would be better off buying a pair of 2.5" 512Gb SSDs and installing them into notebook w/optibay. Then RAID'ing the drives themselves (no difference to this thing). No messy bus power AC adaptor or expensive Thunderbolt interfaces required. Twice the capacity, better performance.Reply

I don't know why someone would say this is a good enclosure - first, the shape is terrible - how can I stack anything on top of it? Second, it looks downright huge in the photo on top of the R6 - with mSata this thing should be about the size of a 2.5" or maybe 3.5" drive. Third, it needs a fan? Oy. Make the darn thing all aluminum and have it act as a heatsink if it needs it.Reply

to run a 2 drive 512gb raid0 it will need the external power. this kills it usefulness.

also the i/o will not be faster. a fan is nuts. it will whine like a female dog.

a 1 drive 256 gb msata with no fan and a good heatsink would have been the way to go.

It could have been smaller then a 2.5 inch drive.

since crucial sells the mSata 256gb ssd for about 225.

you could have this for under 400.

it is fully bootable and with mac you can bring it from machine to machine as its osx.

both a good and bad idea good for connivence bad for security.

right for my money a lacie little big disk is under 240 refurbished from a major mac seller. buy it pull the fan pull the two 500 gb drives sell the drives used on ebay for 85-110 brings your little big disk down to 135. put in 2x 512gb crucial m4's and a 1tb ssd for under 900 or use 2x 256gb ssds and a 512b ssd for under 500Reply

Same way you can have "jumbo shrimp", believe michael jackson never touched a little boys PP, have a tiger for a house pet, or believe OJ's "if the glove doesn't fit, then you cant commit" defense.... its all so utterly stupid.........but you just gotta roll with it!

i think tb ssd's are a good idea and agree with anand re: the form factor and design.

of course we'd all like to see the price lower but these things take time. new tech is always expensive. it's called the "either pay a hefty premium to be the first or wait a year or two" game.

like he said, the idea is good. it'll just take a little time for the tech to mature. as a mba user, i could def see the utility in such a product for imovie projects but will personally be waiting until it's avail in 512gb and cheaper.

Where are you seeing a price for this box that you guys "won't buy because of the insane price". Aren't you being premature?"Promise also isn't releasing any pricing information today, but rest assured that the Pegasus J2 will be expensive."

will I can build a 512gb lacie little big disk raid0 ssd for under 500.. 2x crucial 256gb ssds on sale for 180 each is 360. A refurbhshed lacie littleb big disk is 234. comes to 594. I sell the mechanical hdds on ebay for 100 and my cost is 494. if promise sells there 512gb unit for 494 I will eat my hat. By the way my ssds would have 3 year warranty so only part not warrantied is the little big disk which was under 140 in cost..

I have 3 of these in use for months as osx for mac they are pretty much flawless.. They are also a security risk to any mac user that has thunderbolt as I can plug in and boot there computer and copy the hdd in there computer. BTW this portable boot box is the biggest reason thunderbolt is held back. Think about what you can do with it.Reply

Well, SuperSpeed USB is 5 Gbps with 8b/10b encoding, so really only 4 Gbps, and realistically tops out at 400 MB/s due to protocol overhead. If you're using USB 3.0 drivers and/or hardware that only support standard Bulk Only Transfer mode, throughput will be considerably less than that.

Thunderbolt is 2x 10.3125 Gbps channels per port with 64b/66b encoding which brings them down to 10 Gbps. While most Thunderbolt controllers have a PCIe 2.0 x4 back end, the Port Ridge controller used in this device only provides a single 10 Gbps Thunderbolt channel paired with a PCIe 2.0 x2 connection.

A PCIe 2.0 lane is 5 Gbps but also uses 8b/10b and has its own protocol overhead, which in practice results in throughput of about 400 MB/s, although better results can be achieved with larger TLP payload sizes.

So any Port Ridge based Thunderbolt device would be limited to around 800 MB/s, which is exactly what we see here.

There's one more element to the equation though, and that's the SATA controller. Most USB 3.0 to SATA bridges on the market at the moment only support SATA 3Gb/s, which limits them to less than 300 MB/s (8b/10b strikes again). Meanwhile, most SATA 6Gb/s controllers used in Thunderbolt devices only have a PCIe 2.0 x1 connection which drags them down to 400 MB/s. Which makes me confused about the Pegasus J2's performance, because that's what we would expect from a single ASM1061 controller. I'm guessing there's a second one on that board somewhere.Reply